Energy
Grid disputes are engineering disputes with a regulator attached.
Ontario has spent the last year rewriting how large loads get connected. That produces commercial disputes between proponents, distributors, transmitters and municipalities long before anything reaches a regulator.
What comes up
The disputes.
Commercial disputes around connection, construction and market participation.
- Connection assessment
- Disputes arising out of the IESO connection assessment and approval process — the system impact assessment, the transmitter's customer impact assessment, and the conditions attached to either.
- Leave to construct
- Commercial disputes between proponents, landowners and affected parties around an Ontario Energy Board leave-to-construct application, as distinct from the application itself.
- Proponent and municipality
- Siting, road use, access and community-benefit disputes between a proponent and the municipality it has to build through.
- Market participation
- Disputes between registered market participants, and between a participant and a counterparty, arising out of the IESO-administered markets.
- Large loads and data centres
- The connection assessment behind a data centre or other large load, and the contractual arrangements built on an assumption about when the power arrives.
- EPC and equipment
- Construction and supply disputes on generation, storage and transmission projects, where the construction and the regulatory timetables are coupled.
Why me
A System Impact Assessment is a document, and documents can be read.
Grid connection disputes are usually argued through technical studies. My engineering practice is in infrastructure, so the study, the single-line diagram and the constraint that produced the condition are things I can work through with the parties rather than around them.
The regulatory overlay is the other half. A commercial dispute about a connection sits next to a process at the Ontario Energy Board or the IESO with its own timetable, and a neutral who does not understand that coupling will schedule a mediation for a date at which nothing can yet be decided.
The machinery
Where the processes actually sit.
Named precisely, because two of these are routinely called something they are not.
Leave to construct is section 92. Section 92 of the Ontario Energy Board Act, 1998 provides that no person may construct, expand or reinforce an electricity transmission or distribution line, or make an interconnection, without an order from the Board granting leave. The thresholds everyone actually argues about are not in that section — they are exemptions in a regulation under it, which carves out distribution lines outright and transmission lines of two kilometres or less. Section 90 is the separate provision for hydrocarbon lines. The test is the public interest, and as of December 2025 what the Board may consider on a section 92 application expressly includes supporting economic growth consistent with Government of Ontario policy.
Connection runs through the IESO, and it is not a queue. The IESO operates a six-stage connection process and calls it connection assessment and approval. An application is assessed by system impact assessment, and the transmitter generally runs a customer impact assessment after the draft. The IESO states plainly that it does not use an interconnection queue — it works from a defined set of committed projects instead, so "our place in the queue" describes nothing.
And large loads now have their own gate. Section 28.1 of the Electricity Act, 1998 came into force on 11 December 2025 and creates a connection-approval requirement for a "specified load facility", a category defined to include data centres meeting criteria that may be set by regulation. The enabling section is in force; the Ministry's August 2026 consultation still described the connection-approval regulation as under consideration, and described it as something the province was considering drafting. That consultation, on an assessment framework for new data centres, ran a comment period to 12 September 2026.
Described so the process is legible, not applied to anyone's file — and the terms above are the ones these bodies actually use. Sourced in docs/reference/ontario-energy-regulatory.md.
The context
This one is a position, not a caseload.
Bill 40 — the Protect Ontario by Securing Affordable Energy for Generations Act, 2025 — received Royal Assent on 11 December 2025. It added the large-load connection provision above and widened what the Board may weigh on a leave-to-construct application. Its own preamble names the responsible growth of energy-intensive industries like data centres.
A statute that changes how things get connected changes what parties argue about, and the disputes that follow it have not been had yet. I am saying plainly that this is a position I am building into rather than a volume of work I have already done. The engineering and the regulatory reading are both real now; the file count is not the claim.
The process
And how it would run.
The area is the subject matter. The process is what the parties are choosing between, and each of these describes one — the formats, the rules, and what a party is expected to do and when.
Next step
Start with a call.
Tell me the shape of the matter and who is involved, and I will tell you whether I am the right neutral for it. Inquiries are answered within two business days.